Apollo Expeditions to the Moon

CHAPTER 8.3

PREPARING FOR ALL EVENTUALITIES

Training was the name of the game, and they trained until it seemed the labors of
Hercules were child's play - how to make a tent out of your parachute in case you came
down in a desert; how to kill and eat a snake in the jungles of Panama; how to negotiate
volcanic lava in Hawaii. An Air Force C-135 flew endless parabolas so the
astronauts could have repeated half-minute doses of weightlessness. They wore weights
in huge water tanks in Houston and in Huntsville to get a feel of movement in zero and
one-sixth gravity.

"The great train wreck" was John
Young's description of the contraption
beyond the console. At the top of the
stairs was a compartment that exactly
duplicated a command module control
area, with all switches and equipment.
Astronauts spent countless hours lying
on their backs in the CM simulator in
Houston. Panel lights came on and off,
gauges registered consumables, and
navigational data were displayed. Movie
screens replaced the spacecraft windows
and reflected whatever the computer
was thinking as a result of the combined
input from the console outside and
astronaut responses. Here the astronauts
practiced spacecraft rendezvous,
star alignment, and stabilizing a tumbling spacecraft.
The thousands of hours
of training in this collection of curiously
angled cubicles paid off. Many of the
problems that showed up in flight had
already been considered and it was
then merely a matter of keying in the
proper responses. At left (below), Charles Conrad
and Alan Bean in the LM simulator
at Cape Kennedy prepare to cope with
any possible malfunctions that the controllers at the console outside could
think up to test their familiarity with
the spacecraft and its systems.

Hair-raising was the device called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, a sort of
flying bedstead, which had a downward-pointing jet engine, gimbal-mounted and
computer-controlled to eliminate five-sixths
of gravity. In addition, it had attitude-controlling
thrusters to simulate the way the LM would act before touchdown on the
Moon. If the trainer ran out of fuel at altitude, or if it malfunctioned, the
Apollo commander - for he was the only one who had to fly the thing - had to
eject, which meant he was catapulted several hundred feet into the air before his
parachute opened. That was exactly what happened to Neil Armstrong a few months
before his Apollo 11 mission, when his bedstead started to tilt awry a hundred feet
above the ground. Armstrong shot into the air, then floated to safety; the machine
crashed and burned.

Dozens of training aids sharpened astronaut skills, but the most indispensable were
flight simulators, contraptions built around copies of CM and LM control areas and
complete to every last switch and warning light. Astronauts on prime status for the next
mission would climb in to flip switches and work controls. The simulator would be
linked to a computer programmed to give them practice too. What made it exciting
was that training supervisors could also get in the loop to introduce sneaky malfunctions,
full-bore emergencies, or imminent catastrophes to check on how fast and well
the crews and their controllers would cope. Surrounding the mockup spacecraft were
huge boxes for automatic movie and TV display of what astronauts would see in
flight: Earth, Moon, stars, another spacecraft coming in for docking. When John
Young first encountered a simulator he exclaimed "the great train wreck!". Hour
after weary hour the spacemen had to solve whatever problems the training crews
thought up and fed into the computer. The Apollo 11 crew calculated they spent 2000
hours in simulators between their selection in January and their flight in July 1969.

Neil Armstrong contemplates the distance
between the footpad and the lowest rung:
would he be able to get back up? (The
bottom of the ladder had to end high to
allow for shock-absorber compression of
the LM leg.) He decided he could do it.
Ascent proved no problem in reduced
lunar gravity.

Preparing for the unknown was a challenge. How much work could be done by
a man within a pressurized (and hence
stiff-jointed) spacesuit? What effect would
the lesser lunar gravity have on his efforts?
This truck-borne hoist, adjusted to take out
five-sixths of his weight, gave preliminary
indications. It also previewed the loping
and kangaroo-hopping gaits that would
occur on the Moon. A different way to
simulate lunar gravity was also tried out;
see the rig here.

Some of this bone-cracking training was done in Houston but much of it at the
Cape, in Downey, Calif. (the CM), or Bethpage, Long Island (the LM). When the
astronauts were not training they were flying in their two-seater T-38 planes from one
place to the other, or doing aerobatics to sharpen their edge, or simply to unwind.
Their long absences proved a plague on their home lives, and there was hardly a man among
them who did not consider quitting the program at one time or another "to spend
some time with my family".